Analysis and simulation of nonlinearity and effects of spontaneous emission in Schottky-junction-based plasmonic amplifiers.

Abstract

An amplifier that operates on surface plasmon polaritons has been analyzed and simulated. Nonlinearity behavior and the spontaneous emission effects of the plasmonic amplifier are investigated in this paper. A rate equations approach has been used in which parameters are derived from simulation results of the plasmonic amplifier (Silvaco/ATLAS). Details on the method of this derivation are included, which were not previously reported. Rate equations are solved numerically by MATLAB codes. These codes verify the Silvaco results. The plasmonic amplifier operates on surface plasmons with a free-space wavelength of 1550 nm. Results show that, even without the effect of spontaneous emission, gain of the plasmonic amplifier saturates in high input levels. Saturation power, which can be used for comparing nonlinearity of different amplifiers, is 2.1 dBm for this amplifier. Amplified spontaneous emission reduces the gain of the amplifiers, which is long. There is an optimum value for the length of the amplifier. For the amplifier of this work, the optimum length for the small signal condition is 265 μm.